How I Learned to Love the Bomb: Defcon and the Ethics of Computer Games

In this paper I present an analysis of the ontology and ethics of computer
games from an Information Ethics perspective. This analysis uses the concepts
of Level of Abstraction and Gradient of Abstraction, as defined by Luciano
Floridi's Information Ethics, applied to the specific study of computer games.
The goal of this paper is to argue for the consideration of games as
interesting ethical objects and experiences. Computer games appeal to a player
capable of ethical reasoning in her interaction with simulated environments and
rule systems. This paper provides a theoretical model for the study of the
ethics of computer games both as designed objects, and as player experiences.

This paper introduces the AdRacer system for multifaceted testing and
in-depth analyses of game effects and in-game advertising efficiency. AdRacer
combines an immersive driving simulator, 3D game environment, recording of
players' gaze directions, and application of memory tests. A pilot study tested
the effects of game violence on memory for brands shown as billboard ads in a
racing game. In contrast to findings with TV violence, game violence did not
impede brand memory. Memory results were also not mediated by visual attention
during encoding. Compared to a matching nonviolent version, playing a violent
game resulted in superior brand retrieval, yet participants showed fewer and
shorter eye fixations on the billboard ads. Hence, caution seems to be
recommended in transferring standard results from the "passive" TV medium to
the interactive game medium.

People play certain genres of video games for definitive reasons. The
underlying phenomenon of these manifested reasons, and the source of "hooking"
a player to a game, is Game/World Immersion. Immersion, therefore, is the
single most important factor as to why people play certain genres of video
games. The various elements that are present in such games, such as audio or
visual, are there to create the sense of immersion and are the building blocks
of it.

Computer games have a long history as entertainment media, but their use for
educational or political communication is relatively recent. This paper
explores the use of computer games as news media. Newsgames are computer games
used to participate in the public sphere with the intention of explaining or
commenting on current news. The paper provides a set of concepts for analyzing
newsgames, based on public service theory. The paper expands this analytical
approach with a reflection on game design methodologies for creating newsgames.

Keywords: Newsgames; Serious Games; Public Service Theory; Procedural Rhetorics;
Political Games

Agents That Relate: Improving the Social Believability of Non-Player
Characters in Role-Playing Games

As the video games industry grows and video games become more part of our
lives, we are eager for better gaming experiences. One field in which games
still have much to gain is in Non-Player Character behavior in socially
demanding games, like Role-Playing Games. In Role-Playing Games players have to
interact constantly with very simple Non-Player Characters, with nosocial
behavior in most of the cases, which contrasts with the rich social experience
that was provided in its traditional pen-and-paper format. What we propose in
this paper is that if we create a richer social behavior in Non-Player
Characters the player's gaming experience can be improved. In order to attain
this we propose a model that has at its core social relationships with/between
Non-Player Characters. By doing an evaluation with players, we identified that
80% of them preferred such system, affirming that it created a better gaming
experience.

Surround displays are used in simulation, training, and other applications
based on virtual worlds. A wide-view display engages the viewer's peripheral
vision, providing a more accurate view of the virtual world and therefore a
heightened sense of immersion. However, most commercially available surround
displays are expensive and complex. We developed a low-cost alternative, which
uses a standard digital projector, a hemispherical mirror, and any roughly
spherical or cylindrical screen. The software can handle irregular surfaces and
will be open-sourced in the next release of the CaveUT/VRGL freeware. We also
conducted a pilot study comparing game play in our prototype and game play with
a standard desktop monitor. Players using the surround display reported
significantly shorter (P = 0.0051) perceived duration of time during play.
Reduced awareness of the passage of time during game play was positively
correlated with greater engagement and enjoyment.

Recently various types of robots are being studied and developed, which can
be classified into two groups: humanoid type and animal type. Since each group
has its own merits and demerits, a new type of robot is expected to emerge with
greater strengths and fewer weaknesses. We have proposed a new type of robot
called the "Centaur Robot" by merging the concepts of these two types of
robots. This robot has a human-like upper body and a four-legged animal-like
lower body. Due to this basic architecture, we have found that the robot has
several merits, including human-like behaviors and stable walking. This time we
have carried out the experiments to evaluate the stability of its waling
motion. This paper described the detailed results of the experiments as well as
the construction of the software/hardware of the robot.

We are developing an interactive folktale system in which users can enjoy
both the generation of Japanese folktales as well as interaction with the
system. In order to generate any kind of Japanese folktale, the system must
give each character appearing in the folktales the ability to achieve a
sufficient number of motions. To determine the number of motions that need to
be prepared for the system, we carried out an analysis of the verbs that appear
in Japanese folktales. Based on the analysis of 50 representative Japanese
folktales, we found that the total number of verbs used is more than 2,000. By
deleting the overlap of verbs in different folktales, while giving
consideration to their meanings in actual usage, the number decreased to about
900. In addition, by restricting the verbs to those that can be expressed by
computer graphics, the total number of verbs further decreased to about 100.
Then we carried out experiments on generating various scenes of Japanese
folktales by using several motion sets, each of which is a subset of the 100
motions corresponding to the reduced verbs. Finally, we evaluated the least
number of animations needed to generate animations of sufficient quality.

The selection of path in an urban combat setting determines the survival to
a greater extent. In this paper we propose an algorithm that finds strategic
paths inside a map with a set of enemies without using predetermined waypoints.
The strategic path calculation is based upon the hit probability calculated for
each enemy's weapons and the risk vs. time preference and it is done at
multiple levels of abstractions to address trade-off of efficiency and accuracy
and the strategic path calculation minimizes both time and risk as per mission
objectives.

In this paper I present the results from a design research project done at
the Eindhoven University of Technology. In this project I explored the
possibilities of mixing realities using sound. With this mixed reality I
explored ways to make people scared for entertainment purposes, comparable to
horror-movies or thrill rides. One of the main elements of the concept was to
make the device mobile, so that a thrilling experience can be generated at any
time and any place. The user will put on the audio-device and through a
biofeedback-loop connect himself to the system. While walking around sounds
come from the system that blend in with sounds from the real environment. This
effect causes interesting situations, directed by the users own impulses sensed
by the biofeedback-loop.

In recent years, online gaming has become one of the most popular Internet
activities, but cheating activity, such as the use of game bots, has increased
as a consequence. Generally, the gaming community disagrees with the use of
game bots, as bot users obtain unreasonable rewards without corresponding
efforts. However, bots are hard to detect because they are designed to simulate
human game playing behavior and they follow game rules exactly. Existing
detection approaches either interrupt the players' gaming experience, or they
assume game bots are run as standalone clients or assigned a specific goal,
such as aim bots in FPS games.
In this paper, we propose a trajectory-based approach to detect game bots.
It is a general technique that can be applied to any game in which the avatar's
movement is controlled directly by the players. Through real-life data traces,
we show that the trajectories of human players and those of game bots are very
different. In addition, although game bots may endeavor to simulate players'
decisions, certain human behavior patterns are difficult to mimic because they
are AI-hard. Taking Quake 2 as a case study, we evaluate our scheme's
performance based on real-life traces. The results show that the scheme can
achieve a detection accuracy of 95% or higher given a trace of 200 seconds or
longer.

It is expected that the sphere of activity of robots will spread widely in
the near future not only in fields of industry but to various aspects of our
everyday life. On the basis of this expectation, in this research we aimed at
the creation of a robot that supports our daily life and tried to develop a
small-sized humanoid robot that can find an object, pick it up, and carry it.
We developed an algorithm for a robot to recognize an object using color
information. Also, based on the algorithm the robot calculates the direction
and the distance to the object, moves to the precise position and picks up the
object and carries it. Finally, we carried out an experiment to evaluate the
performance and were able to obtain a high success rate.

This paper proposes a system of interactive multimedia contents that allows
multiple users to participate in a face-to-face manner and share the same time
and space. It provides an interactive environment where multiple users can see
and manipulate stereoscopic animation with individual sound. Two application
examples are implemented; one is location-based content design and the other is
user-based content design. Both effectively use a unique feature of the
IllusionHole, i.e., a location-sensitive display device that provides a
stereoscopic image with multiple users around the table.

To optimize a player's experience, an emotionally adaptive game continuously
adapts its mechanics to the player's emotional state, measured in terms of
emotion-data. This paper presents the first of two studies that aim to realize
an emotionally adaptive game. It investigates the relations between game
mechanics, a player's emotional state and his/her emotion-data. In an
experiment, one game mechanic (speed) was manipulated. Emotional state was
self-reported in terms of valence, arousal and boredom-frustration-enjoyment.
In addition, a number of (mainly physiology-based) emotion-data features were
measured. Correlations were found between the valence/arousal reports and the
emotion-data features. In addition, seven emotion-data features were found to
distinguish between a boring, frustrating and enjoying game mode. Taken
together, these features convey sufficient data to create a first version of an
emotionally adaptive game.

With the rapid advancement of hardware and software, entertainment computing
industry has been popularized during the last decade. TV content/story
production is a major bottleneck in the entertainment industry. Previous work
has identified key problems, such as narrative control, the duality between
character and plot, the tension between interactivity and storytelling, and the
tools that artists can use to create interactive story worlds. Due to the
tradeoff between narrative progression and user interaction, striking a balance
between the two is a big challenge. As a solution to such a challenge,
Bcreative system has been developed. It is a unified prototype of both
plot-based and character-based interactive storytelling. The idea is derived
from the study of both Petri nets (PN) and cinematography in interactive
storytelling. The system architecture is composed of two engines: a story
engine and a character engine through a smart user-friendly graphical user
interface (GUI). The story engine models the story plot based on the Petri nets
(PN) reachability analysis, while the character engine enhances the modeling of
character behavior based on filmmaking theory. This paper discusses the
development process of our proposed system, illustrating the design and
implementation in detail. Comparisons with existing techniques are included,
and the advantages of our proposed system over existing ones are examined.
Evaluation and practical performance results are also demonstrated.

Creative thinking requires imagination, creativity, play, sharing and
reflection. This paper presents an architecture for a curious, reconfigurable
robot that encourages creative design thinking by permitting designed
structures to learn behaviours. These behaviours encourage designers to play
with different structures, reflect on the relationship between structure and
behaviour and imagine new structures. A demonstration of the architecture is
described using the Lego Mindstorms platform. The demonstration shows how a
curious robot can adapt new behaviours in response to changes in its structure,
and how this can encourage the creative thinking spiral and creative design.

Advances in computer technologies have enabled new means of musical
expression with motion enabled musical instruments, which have attracted a
great deal of attention. We created a new performance system that enables a
dancer to make music while b-boying, which is a dance style. We implemented
sensor-equipped shoes and a system that recognizes motions and that controls
music. We used an implemented prototype on stage, and we found that dancers
were able to control the music flexibly while b-boying. Our system will bring
about a new style of musical performance for both musicians and dancers.

The augmented book is the system augmenting multimedia elements onto a book
to bring additional education effects or amusement. A book includes many pages
and many duplicated designs so that tracking a book is quite difficult. For the
augmented book, we propose the hybrid visual tracking which merges the merits
of two traditional approaches: fiducial marker tracking and markerless
tracking. The new method does not cause visual discomfort and can stabilizes
camera pose estimation in real-time.

This paper describes our research on integrating emotion aspects into
characters of video games. Motivation for this is the significant absence of
emotive expression in most characters of current games. In order to provide
players with a more immersed game experience, it is essential that characters
show compelling expressions, in particular, facial expressions. As a research
methodology, we took several intense scenes from classic movies and evaluated
what would be necessary to allow a virtual character to reenact the scenes
inside a game. The recreated scenes should convey the same emotions as the
original scenes. Our approach represents the internal state of a video game
characters by using a PAD-based model, as well as modeling the impact on it of
many relevant environment aspects. Representing this internal state also
involves blending together animations to create lively facial expressions. We
conclude that the resulting model is good enough to allow scenes to be
recreated with an emotional load similar to the original scenes. The approach
is also successful inimproving the consistency of the mood of the characters
based on their personality.

Sense Cup: A Design of a New Interactive Holistic Sense Convergence Device
for Digital Storytelling

In this paper, we propose "Sense cup" as a new design concept of a device
for enhancing the digital storytelling by serving interactive five senses
convergence experience. We designed the cup for providing holistic sense
experiences with beverage that synchronized with digital contents such as
movies and music and catch the user reaction to generate interaction between
users and contents provider.

Recently, we have presented a comic generating system that visualizes an
online-game play. Our system was inspired by a former work of Shamir et al.
However, comics generated in their work can have series of similar frames when
multiple actions occur near each other in both time and space. In this paper,
we first present a frame-selection module that uses Habituated Self-Organizing
Map. Our method prevents comic readers from boredom by getting rid of resemble
consecutive frame candidates. We then evaluate the method by a subject
experiment using a play from the ICE, an online-game developed in our
laboratory. Experimental result confirms that our method is effective in making
output comics more interesting than a baseline method.

Conscientious Objector: Pacifism, Politics and Abusing the Player in Doom 3

This paper describes Conscientious Objector, a research mod built using the
idTech4 engine and assets from the commercial game Doom 3. It was designed to
explore the potential for non-lethal force in FPS gaming, and player response
to a radically different avatar-NPC relationship.

During a eleven-week installation of an immersive augmented reality (AR)
experience at an art and technology gallery, we faced the practical challenges
of preparing for live public audiences and of training and motivating a group
of nine modestly-paid undergraduate museum docents to not only usher the show,
but to perform as "wizards". The docents played an integral part of the AR
Façade experience, replacing imperfect recognition technology to achieve
speech and gesture interaction for the players. Our investigation of the wizard
docents revealed insights into two conceptually different wizard-of-oz
implementations. The docents initially resisted the interface option that
required more cognitive load, but after learning how to make it work, many
preferred that interface because it provided them more agency within the system
and freedom to diversify the experience for audiences.

This paper proposes a fast rendering algorithm for real-time animation of
large crowds, which is essential for video games with a large number of
non-player characters. The proposed approach leaves the minimal work of
rendering to CPU, and makes GPU take all the major work, including LOD
assignment and view frustum culling, which have been the typical tasks of CPU.
By offloading the rendering overhead from CPU, the approach enables the CPU to
perform intensive computations for crowd simulation. The experiments show that
tens of thousands of characters can be skin-animated in real time.

In traditional video games, players are used to handle well known devices
such as a keyboard or a mouse. In a pervasive game, no virtual world exists,
since players evolve in a real environment. Hence, new kinds of interaction
devices are needed. The physiological approach presented in this paper is one
of the most promising solutions. We have build our own sensing tee-shirt on
which physiological sensors are sewed. It makes it possible to monitor in real
time the players' physiological states with a minimum of mechanical
constraints.

Human communication is fostered in environments of regional communities and
cultures and in different languages. Cultures are rooted in their unique
histories. Communication media have been developed to circulate these cultural
characteristics. The theme of our research is "Cultural Computing", which means
the translation of cultures using scientific methods representing essential
aspects of Japanese culture [1]. We study the reproduction of a traditional
Japanese Haiku by computer. Our system can abstract an essence of human
emotions and thoughts into a Haiku, a Japanese minimal poem form. A user
chooses arbitrary phrases from a chapter of the essay "1000 Books and 1000
Nights" [2]. Using the phrases chosen by the user, our system generates the
Haiku which includes the essence of these words.

Keywords: Poem; Haiku; Haiku generation; Art; Interactive art

Posters

Dome Displays for Educational Games and Activities in the Museum and on the
Road

The immersive Earth Theater at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH)
uses CaveUT and the Unreal Engine for real time virtual tours as part of public
and educational programming. Research conducted comparing the theater with
desktop displays shows immersion is a powerful tool, helping people create more
connections. Content builds on the museum's strengths and includes dinosaurs,
an Egyptian temple and a Seneca village. CMNH has tremendous expertise in
traditional tours, combining skills of storytelling, communication, leading
group dynamics, timing and humor to convey and contextualize the topics. This
background is just as critical to great virtual tours as the beautiful, complex
and natural graphics.

The ability to simulate a seaport environment, including illicit cargo and
the sensors designed to detect such cargo, allows the evaluation of alternative
detection methods in order to improve security at our nation's seaports. We
describe our progress towards this goal. Specifically, we describe our modeling
of threats at a particle emission level, modeling of sensors as particle
detectors, modeling of the seaport dynamics (e.g, ships, cargo containers,
cranes, trucks), and how the particles interact with the various structures and
materials in the seaport environment as the cargo moves through the seaport.
Ultimately, this simulation will serve as a testbed for the evaluation of
sensor network data collection, fusion and decision making for threat detection
in a seaport environment.

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) has found applications for disabled users.
Progress in BCI research allows looking at applications for 'abled' users. For
these applications users have other demands, and they will be critical about
devices that limit physical movements and that require long periods of
training. Prototype BCI applications now appear in the domain of games and
entertainment that aim at adapting and controlling a game using brain signals
in addition to traditional physical and mental abilities.

In this poster we present the observations results of video gamers playing
Halo 3 on the X-Box console. We report on the data we have gathered thanks to a
Noldus Observer system. These data relate to gamer behaviour, game actions and
basic biofeedback.

In this paper we report on a novel form of media we call BioMedia. We
introduce the concept and we explain its features. We then present two
prototypes we have developed using BioMedia in entertainment.